Why What Helps You Feel Better Might Stress Someone Else Out
Understanding how our nervous systems work may change the way we experience the people we live with—and perhaps even ourselves.
Imagine coming home after a long, demanding day. You’re ready to unwind, so you turn on your favorite music, start preparing dinner, and dance around the kitchen. Perhaps you even sing along. For you, this is what relaxing looks like. The music invites the stress to melt away.
Meanwhile, your spouse is sitting in the next room, growing increasingly irritated. They’ve spent the day navigating conversations, competing demands, and background noise. All they want is a little peace and quiet.
You think you’re creating a pleasant evening at home. They feel like they can’t get a moment’s rest.
And just like that, two perfectly reasonable adults are on their way to an argument about something as seemingly insignificant as background music.
Suddenly, someone isn’t considerate enough. Someone else is too sensitive. Before long, we may find ourselves debating whose preferences deserve priority—or revisiting the great household volume dispute of last Tuesday.
But what if we’ve misunderstood the situation from the beginning?
What if the explanation isn’t simply a difference in personality, thoughtfulness, or consideration? What if both people are doing something perfectly natural—attempting to regulate their nervous systems—but the strategies that work for one are making things harder for the other?
This is something I’ve become increasingly curious about through my work with the Alert Program® and Your Best Self.
We often think about self-regulation in relation to children, classrooms, or individuals who need additional support. But the more I explore the underlying concepts, the more I recognize how relevant they are to ordinary adult life, particularly the sometimes wonderful, sometimes complicated experience of sharing a home with another human being.
After all, we don’t leave our nervous systems at the door when we come home.
A quick note about what we’re exploring—and what we’re not
Before we go further, I want to clarify my perspective: I’m not a psychologist or occupational therapist. My background is in organizational change, human resources, and helping people navigate complex systems. These days, as the owner of the Alert Program® system, I’ve become fascinated by the intersection of sensory regulation, human behavior, and everyday life.
This article is intentionally focused on sensory preferences, self-regulation, and what the Alert Program® calls detective work: observing what helps our bodies and brains function well, recognizing what may interfere, and becoming curious about the differences between us.
We’re not attempting to explain the full complexity of emotional conflict, attachment, trauma, or relationship dynamics. Those are important subjects, and they absolutely influence how we experience the people around us. They also deserve their own thoughtful exploration.
For now, I want to examine one piece of a much larger puzzle—a piece that I suspect many of us overlook because it is so woven into ordinary daily life.
What if something we interpret as an emotional or relational problem has a sensory component we haven’t considered?
And what might change if we noticed it?
We All Have Engines, but They Don’t Run the Same Way
One of the foundational concepts of the Alert Program® is a simple analogy: our bodies are like car engines. Sometimes our engines run high, sometimes low, and sometimes just right for what we’re trying to accomplish.
When our engines run high, we might feel restless, overwhelmed, distracted, or overly energized. When they’re running low, we might feel sluggish, disengaged, or unable to concentrate. A just-right engine is one that’s operating at an appropriate level of alertness for the activity at hand.
Now, imagine four people living under the same roof, each with an engine running at a different level:
Take a look at this illustration. What do you notice?
Perhaps the son wakes up every morning with his engine running high, bouncing out of bed ready to take on the world, while Mom’s engine takes a little longer to get going. Maybe Dad is already running just right for his morning routine, while another family member is still operating in low gear.
Same household. Same morning. Four very different experiences.
Now consider what happens when those engines interact. The son’s enthusiastic morning chatter might be delightful to someone who’s already wide awake, but overwhelming to someone whose engine is still running low. And the person moving slowly through their morning may appear disengaged when, in reality, they’re simply not yet at their optimal level of alertness.
Neither person necessarily needs fixing. But understanding these differences might help everyone navigate the morning a little more comfortably.
And here’s an important distinction: just right doesn’t necessarily mean calm.
If you’re about to give an energetic presentation, go dancing, or compete in a sporting event, you probably want your engine running at a higher level than when you’re preparing for sleep. Self-regulation involves recognizing and adjusting our alertness to meet the demands of different situations.
The Alert Program® teaches that we use sensory information throughout the day to help make those adjustments, often without consciously recognizing what we’re doing.
Consider your morning routine. Do you need a hot cup of coffee before you’re ready to talk? Does an invigorating shower help you wake up? Do you turn on music while getting dressed, or do you prefer to begin your day in silence?
Perhaps you’re one of those mysterious people who wakes up cheerful, alert, and ready for meaningful conversation before sunrise. I admire you, even if others in your household might prefer a warning.
These preferences aren’t simply quirks or habits. They may also be ways we’re using sensory input to influence how alert, comfortable, and ready to function we feel.
Now consider the person you live with.
What if the very things that help you get your engine running just right have an entirely different effect on theirs?
And what if we’ve spent years assigning meaning to those differences without ever understanding what might be happening underneath?
Five Ways We Change How Alert We Feel
The Alert Program® organizes common sensory strategies into five accessible categories: Mouth, Move, Touch, Look, and Listen.
These categories help us recognize the ways we interact with our environment to influence our state of alertness.
For example:
- Mouth: Sipping a warm beverage, chewing gum, eating something crunchy, or enjoying a strongly flavored food.
- Move: Walking, stretching, exercising, rocking in a chair, or pushing and pulling against resistance.
- Touch: Cuddling, receiving a massage, petting an animal, handling a favorite fabric, or using a fidget.
- Look: Opening the curtains, dimming the lights, watching a fire, or reducing visual clutter.
- Listen: Playing music, enjoying nature sounds, talking with someone, or seeking a quiet environment.
We all have preferences, and those preferences aren’t necessarily fixed. What helps us wake up in the morning may not be what we need after a stressful day. A strategy that feels wonderful in one situation may be irritating in another.
Even the intensity, duration, frequency, and rhythm of sensory input can matter.
Perhaps you enjoy physical affection but find that prolonged cuddling becomes uncomfortable. Maybe you love music but need silence when reading. You might find walking energizing in the morning and soothing in the evening.
There is no single sensory recipe that works for everyone.
And this is where living with another adult gets interesting.
We may share a home, a schedule, and a relationship without sharing the same sensory needs.
Frankly, given how many differences already exist between two human beings, it’s rather remarkable that we expect our preferred ways of relaxing, concentrating, or falling asleep to align so effortlessly.
Yet we often do.
We become accustomed to our own experiences and quietly assume they’re universal. After all, if soft music helps me relax, shouldn’t it help you? If cuddling feels comforting to me, why would you want to move away? If I need to stretch my legs after sitting all day, why would that bother anyone?
The answers may be more interesting than we realize.
What Does the Research Tell Us?
The relationship between sensory processing and our everyday experiences is an evolving area of research, and the findings offer compelling reasons to pay attention.
A 2024 systematic review by Harrold and colleagues, published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, examined the association between sensory processing and stress in adults. The researchers found emerging evidence that differences in self-reported sensory processing may be associated with differences in experienced stress.
Think about that for a moment.
Two people might occupy the exact same room, encounter the same sounds, and experience the same environmental conditions—yet experience very different levels of stress.
The circumstances may be shared. The experience is not necessarily shared.
This doesn’t mean sensory preferences explain every emotional reaction. Stress is complex, and physical health, lived experiences, relationships, and environmental demands all contribute. But it raises an interesting possibility: something that appears minor to one person may represent a much more significant demand on another person’s nervous system.
Research involving people with ADHD offers another perspective. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry examined 30 studies involving more than 5,000 participants, including children and adults. Researchers found differences in sensory sensitivity, avoidance, seeking, and registration among people with ADHD compared with control groups.
The findings were significant, although the studies varied substantially in their methods and results. Importantly, the review does not suggest that everyone with ADHD has the same sensory profile.
Similarly, a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review examined 63 studies involving more than 11,000 autistic participants. Researchers found associations between sensory-processing differences and internalizing or externalizing difficulties, with some sensory patterns showing stronger relationships than others.
These studies help us appreciate that sensory processing is not an insignificant detail of human experience.
But I also find myself wondering whether we sometimes make the conversation unnecessarily narrow by focusing only on diagnoses.
Certainly, sensory processing differences may be particularly consequential for some neurodivergent individuals. Yet we all process sensory information. We all encounter environments that support us and environments that challenge us.
And we all have preferences that someone else might find rather peculiar.
You don’t need a diagnosis to discover that fluorescent lighting gives you a headache, that background noise makes concentration difficult, or that a brisk walk is the fastest way to feel like yourself again.
The research doesn’t establish that sensory differences are responsible for disagreements between spouses or roommates. That’s a separate question, and one deserving of further study.
But it does invite us to consider whether sensory experiences are influencing more of our everyday interactions than we recognize.
How often do we interpret someone else’s sensory needs as a personality problem, when we haven’t yet considered what their nervous system might be experiencing?
When Two Engines Meet: Everyday Life at Home
Let’s bring this back to ordinary life, where the science becomes considerably more interesting—and where we occasionally discover that the person we love most has some truly baffling preferences.
The person who needs quiet and the person who needs sound
One partner loves having music or television playing in the background. It helps them concentrate, lifts their mood, or makes the house feel more inviting. The other finds that same background noise distracting or exhausting.
It’s easy for this disagreement to become personal. One person feels criticized for enjoying something harmless. The other feels ignored when asking for quiet.
But what changes if both recognize that sound may be serving different functions for their nervous systems?
Rather than debating whether the house should be quiet or lively, perhaps the conversation becomes more practical. Could headphones help? Would designated quiet periods make a difference? Does the type or volume of music matter?
We might even discover that the person asking for silence doesn’t always need silence. Perhaps they simply need a predictable period of quiet after work. Or maybe the music lover doesn’t require continuous background sound—they just enjoy it while cooking.
Suddenly, what felt like an irreconcilable difference might become a relatively manageable environmental adjustment.
The goal isn’t necessarily to convince someone to appreciate our preferences. It’s to discover what helps each of us function well.
The person who wants closeness and the person who needs space
Physical affection is another fascinating example.
For some people, touch is an especially comforting form of sensory input. Cuddling on the couch, holding hands, or receiving a gentle back rub may help them settle after a difficult day.
For someone else, even welcome physical contact may eventually feel overwhelming. They might enjoy affection but need to change positions, get up and move, or spend time without being touched.
Without understanding these differences, one person may experience the movement away as rejection. The other may feel confused about why a normal physical need has become emotionally significant.
And before anyone knows what happened, an innocent change of position on the couch has become a referendum on the relationship.
Could something change if we recognized that enjoying affection and needing movement aren’t mutually exclusive?
Perhaps the answer lies in discovering the type, intensity, and duration of touch that feels comfortable for both people.
Understanding sensory preferences doesn’t eliminate the emotional dimensions of intimacy, but it may help prevent us from assigning unintended meanings to ordinary physical responses.
There’s an important distinction between what someone does and what we conclude it means.
Sometimes those conclusions are accurate. Sometimes they deserve another look.
The person who needs movement and the person who needs stillness
Now imagine two people decompressing after work.
One wants to settle into a comfortable chair and do absolutely nothing. The other feels restless and wants to take a walk, work in the garden, or tackle a household project.
We might label one person energetic and the other sedentary. We might even begin judging whose approach is healthier or more productive.
But what if each is simply choosing the activity that helps their nervous system recover from the day?
The Alert Program® places particular emphasis on proprioceptive input, sometimes called heavy work. This includes activities that engage muscles and joints through pushing, pulling, lifting, or carrying. These forms of sensory input are frequently explored as strategies for supporting regulation.
That doesn’t mean heavy work will automatically calm every person, or that movement is always preferable to rest. The important question is whether a particular strategy helps someone reach an appropriate level of alertness for what they need to do next.
Perhaps the person who needs movement isn’t avoiding time together. Perhaps the person who needs stillness isn’t being lazy.
Maybe they are simply approaching recovery differently.
Once we recognize that possibility, we may find ourselves becoming less judgmental—and considerably more curious.
What If We Became Detectives Instead of Critics?
One of my favorite concepts from the Alert Program® is something called detective work.
And I love this concept because it asks us to do something both simple and surprisingly difficult: observe before drawing conclusions.
Rather than immediately attempting to change a behavior, we learn to become curious about what might be happening.
Is someone seeking sensory input? Avoiding it? Trying to become more alert? Trying to recover from overstimulation? Is the activity helping them function, or is it making things more difficult?
Importantly, the Alert Program® doesn’t assume every behavior has a sensory explanation. Physical needs, emotional stress, environmental demands, and other factors can all contribute.
But detective work gives us a different place to begin.
Imagine noticing that your spouse consistently retreats to a quiet room after work. Rather than assuming they’re being distant, you might wonder whether they need time away from conversation and noise.
Or perhaps someone you live with tends to pace during difficult discussions. Could movement be helping them organize their thoughts rather than indicating that they aren’t listening?
We don’t know until we explore.
And here’s where I think this gets especially interesting: we can turn the detective work toward ourselves.
What am I doing when I begin to feel overwhelmed? Am I reaching for my phone, taking a walk, turning down the lights, or seeking conversation? Is that strategy actually helping me? And might the same strategy affect the people around me differently?
This is not about scrutinizing every movement or assigning a psychological explanation to every household habit. That sounds exhausting, and frankly, I suspect most of us have enough going on.
It’s about developing a little more awareness and expanding our options.
The Alert Program® encourages us to consider what supports function and what compromises it. That might be one of the most useful questions we can bring into shared living spaces.
Because sometimes a behavior doesn’t actually need to change. Sometimes we simply need to understand it.
And sometimes we do need to experiment with alternatives—not because anyone is wrong, but because we’re trying to create an environment where more than one person can function well.
Curiosity creates room for understanding before we rush toward correction.
Understanding Someone Isn’t the Same as Managing Them
There’s another distinction I think deserves attention, particularly when we’re talking about adults who live together.
Understanding someone’s sensory preferences does not mean becoming responsible for maintaining their ideal sensory environment at every moment.
This matters.
If one person finds noise overwhelming, that deserves consideration. If another needs movement to feel comfortable, that deserves consideration too.
The goal shouldn’t be for one person to continually suppress their needs to accommodate the other.
Instead, we can look for ways to support both people. That might involve changing the physical environment, developing predictable routines, communicating preferences more clearly, or simply recognizing when our needs differ.
It’s a subtle but significant shift.
Rather than asking, “What do I need to stop doing so you can feel comfortable?” we might ask, “How can we create conditions that work better for both of us?”
Of course, there will be compromises. Living with another person involves making room for experiences and preferences beyond our own. And sensory explanations don’t eliminate personal responsibility, respectful communication, or the need for healthy boundaries.
But I find something encouraging about the possibility of approaching those compromises with more information and less judgment.
Understanding is not the same as assuming responsibility.
We can become more aware of someone else’s nervous system while continuing to respect our own.
Can Understanding Our Own Regulation Help Us Support Each Other?
There is another interesting dimension to this conversation: our nervous systems don’t operate entirely independently of the people around us.
Researchers studying interpersonal regulation have explored how people influence one another’s physiological responses during social interactions.
A 2024 study published in Psychophysiology examined physiological synchrony during supportive conversations among friends and romantic partners. The researchers found that patterns of physiological coordination varied across interactions and relationships.
These findings don’t establish that partners always calm each other, or that physiological synchrony is necessarily beneficial. The researchers emphasize that interpersonal physiological processes are complex.
Still, the research invites an intriguing question: if our physiological responses can influence one another, how might our everyday sensory habits contribute to the experience of sharing a home?
Perhaps a quiet evening routine helps two people transition toward sleep. Perhaps one person’s preferred background noise becomes another person’s source of stress. Or perhaps recognizing that a partner needs movement after work helps us interpret that activity more accurately.
I think about this in terms of creating conditions for success.
Through my professional work in organizational change, I’ve spent years examining how environments, expectations, and systems influence people’s ability to perform. We often expect individuals to adapt to systems that weren’t designed with their needs in mind.
What happens when we bring that same curiosity into our homes?
Not to turn our relationships into organizational improvement projects—although I confess that a good stakeholder analysis can be tempting—but to recognize that the environments we create influence how comfortably we live, work, connect, and recover.
Maybe the question isn’t always whether someone is trying hard enough.
Maybe we haven’t yet understood what would help them function better.
Start With Your Own Engine
One of the most useful aspects of the Alert Program® is that we don’t need to begin by analyzing someone else.
We can start by observing ourselves.
Over the next few days, consider paying attention to the small things you do without thinking. What happens when your energy begins to dip? What do you reach for when you’re overwhelmed? How do you prepare for a demanding conversation, a period of concentration, or a good night’s sleep?
You might begin with three questions:
- What works for me? Which activities, environments, or sensory experiences help me feel alert, focused, comfortable, or ready to rest?
- What bothers me? Are there sounds, movements, textures, types of touch, or visual environments that make functioning more difficult?
- What could I experiment with? If a familiar strategy isn’t working—or creates difficulty for someone I live with—is there another way to meet the same need?
You don’t need to overhaul your routine. The purpose is to begin noticing patterns that may have been present for years.
And if someone else in your household becomes curious, perhaps you can compare discoveries.
You may find that you share more preferences than expected. Or you may discover that what feels restorative to one person is something the other would never voluntarily choose.
Either discovery can be useful.
I also think there’s value in resisting the temptation to label every preference immediately. Sometimes we become so eager to understand a behavior that we skip the most interesting step: observing it.
What if we simply paid attention for a while?
What if we treated our assumptions as hypotheses rather than conclusions?
We might learn something surprising about the people we love. We might learn something equally surprising about ourselves.
And wouldn’t that be interesting?
Discover Your Best Self
The more I learn about self-regulation, the more fascinated I become by how much of our daily lives involves adjusting to the world around us.
We adapt to noise, light, movement, physical contact, competing demands, and changing routines. Much of the time, we make these adjustments automatically, rarely stopping to consider why certain experiences help us feel our best while others leave us struggling.
And when we live with other people, those individual experiences intersect constantly.
That’s one reason I’m excited about Your Best Self: The Alert Program® For All.
Developed by occupational therapists Mary Sue Williams and Sherry Shellenberger, this online course brings the Alert Program®’s foundational concepts to adults who want to better understand their own self-regulation.
Through approachable explanations and practical learning activities, participants explore how sensory information affects their alertness, begin recognizing their individual preferences, and discover strategies they can experiment with in everyday life.
It’s not a marriage course or a substitute for counseling. It’s an opportunity to become more knowledgeable about something we rely on every day: our ability to recognize and influence how alert we feel.
And perhaps that personal understanding can have an unexpected benefit.
When we become more aware of what helps our own nervous systems function, we may become more curious, flexible, and compassionate toward the different needs of the people around us.
I don’t expect understanding sensory regulation to solve every disagreement at home. Relationships are much more complicated than that, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend otherwise.
But I do wonder how many small frustrations might become easier to navigate if we approached them with curiosity instead of judgment.
Perhaps the next time someone turns on music, asks for quiet, reaches for a blanket, gets up to move, or needs a little space, we’ll be less inclined to immediately interpret that behavior through our own preferences.
Perhaps we’ll wonder what their engine needs.
And perhaps we’ll become a little better at recognizing what our own engine needs, too.
You can’t control someone else’s engine. But you can learn more about your own.
That might be a surprisingly meaningful place to begin.
Explore Your Best Self: The Alert Program® For All
Research and Further Reading
- Harrold, A., Keating, K., Larkin, F., & Setti, A. (2024). The association between sensory processing and stress in the adult population: A systematic review. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 16(4), 2536–2566. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12554
- Jurek, L., et al. (2025). Sensory Processing in Individuals With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Compared With Control Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 64(10), 1132–1147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2025.02.019
- Chen, Y., et al. (2024). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between sensory processing differences and internalising/externalising problems in autism. Clinical Psychology Review, 114, 102516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102516
- DiGiovanni, A. M., Peters, B. J., Tudder, A., Gresham, A. M., & Bolger, N. (2024). Physiological synchrony in supportive discussions: An examination of co-rumination, relationship type, and heterogeneity. Psychophysiology, 61(7), e14554. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14554
- Williams, M. S., & Shellenberger, S. (2025). “How Does Your Engine Run?”® A Leader’s Guide to the Alert Program® for Self-Regulation (2nd ed.). TherapyWorks, Inc.
The Alert Program® is an educational approach to understanding sensory processing and self-regulation. The examples in this article are illustrative and do not constitute psychological assessment, diagnosis, or individualized treatment advice.
